The Best WordPress Related Posts Plugin – Why Outbrain is the Perfect Solution

I have been using various related posts plugins for years on my WordPress installations but they never did exactly what I wanted.

Either they were way to complicated and involved a lot of manual work or they were too simple and not very effective.

When I found Outbrain, I thought there had to be a catch…

I saw that they had sponsored ads in their widget and at first I thought they were required (the ads are actually turned off by default).

Everything is completely free and Outbrain is the perfect solution for all my blogs.

Why Outbrain is the Best WordPress Related Posts Plugin

• No extra work required for the plugin to know which of your posts are “related.” Once you install the Outbrain plugin it will immediately start displaying related posts on your blog.
• It looks really great. The design is really great and pulls thumbnails from your post with ease. If you don’t have images on your site then you can also just set it to text links.
• If you don’t have a thumbnail for one of your posts it automatically creates a cool looking picture using the actual text of your article.
• It has a plugin for every blogging platform I’ve heard of and you can just get the javascript code.
• By installing it manually with the javascript code you can have even greater control over where it displays your related posts.
• Automatically inherits your CSS styles and colors. No need to edit any of your code.
• It automatically removes posts after a user has visited them. They will never be recommended a post they’ve already read. Awesome!

How to Install the Best WordPress Related Posts Plugin.

The Easy Way:

Go get the Outbrain Plugin for your own blogging platform and follow the installation instructions. Once you have it installed, navigate to the Outbrain settings and choose where you want the related posts to appear.

Outbrain will get you to create an account with them and confirm your blog. When you login to the outbrain site there are many other settings you can change, such as whether to run ads in the widget.

Manually Installing Outbrain on WordPress Running the Thesis Theme:

If you’re not running Thesis Theme (how to get started with Thesis) for WordPress I suggest you start.

I wanted to make sure that I would be able to have complete control over which posts Outbrain runs on and this is how I did it (with the help of this post on Tech Tips Geek).

1. Install the Thesis Openhook Plugin.

2. Get the Outbrain Javascript code.

3. Add the following code to your custom_functions.php:

   function currentPageURL() {
   $curpageURL = 'http';
   if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {$curpageURL.= "s";}
   $curpageURL.= "://";
   if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
   $curpageURL.= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
   } else {
   $curpageURL.= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
   }
   return $curpageURL;
   }

4. Go to Appearance – Thesis Openhook – After Post and add the javascript code. Replace DROP_PERMALINK_HERE with

   <?php echo currentPageURL(); ?>

5. Make sure that Outbrain is displaying your related posts.